HN 64 
.C65 
Copy 1 



THE 



Crisis of Democracy 




BY 



TR.EADWELL CLEVELAND. Jr. 

WASHINGTON. D. C. 



THE 



Crisis of DEnocRAcv 



^ 



By TREADWELL CLEVELAND, Jr. 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 



UBRARV»f CONGRESS I 

Two CoDics Received ' 

JUN U 190/' I 

^ Copyrtjrht Entry 'i 

CLASg' <^ XXc, Wo, 
COPY B. 






r" 



Copyright, 1907, by 
Treadwbi.1, Ci,evei.and, Jr. 



THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY. 



By the clearest signs we know that, under whatever name we may 
choose to give it, a class struggle is waging in our democracy over the 
sharing of prosperity. One phase of this struggle is the conflict between 
capital and labor, but this is only part of it. It goes far deeper than 
wages, injunctions, an eight-hour law, or alien labor. Its issues root in 
the foundation of our national life and grapple with the very rock on 
which that foundation rests. It has come that every citizen may have 
life, and have it more abundantly. It has come, as the Declaration of 
Independence came, that the oppressed may be relieved, that special privi- 
lege may give place to equal rights, and license to liberty. What the 
Revolution did for our political life the class struggle is to do for our 
industrial life — establish self-government by the majority. 

Democracies have sprung up in the past, flourished, and decayed. 
They have sprung up under the strong sun of liberty ; they have flourished 
in its bright light ; they have decayed in its weakening rays. The morning 
of American Democracy has been radiant. Is it already high noon with 
our liberty? Are we destined henceforth to witness its decline, until it 
sets again in some new era of bondage, completing the cycle which 
dawned with the Declaration ? 

The answer rests entirely with ourselves. It depends, in the first 
place, upon the vitality of our hold on ideals. Fully as much, it depends 
upon the intelligence with which we define these ideals, upon the wisdom 
with which we plan their realization, and upon the energy and discretion 
with which we set ourselves to carry out the plan. All that has ever knit 
together a nation and carried it forward to achievement and glory is the 
power and sanctity of a national ideal. Every nation in its day of growth 
and uplift has felt itself the chosen people of its god, identified its aims 
with the cosmic purposes, held itself as the bearer of a mission to the 
world. With the failing of its faith in its divine calling, in its gospel to 
humanity, strength has fled from its sinews, inspiration has departed from 
its prophets, its patriots have become satirists and cynics and its soldiers 

3 



deserters and mercenaries. Doubting, divided against itself, it has then 
fallen a prey to the believing nations, with boundless confidence, and the 
boundless strength which comes with confidence, in themselves and a high 
destiny. If liberty is to wane among us this is because our ideals have 
become clouded overhead, because we have lost faith in the mission of 
American Democracy to the nations of the earth. 

This faith in our mission, so strong and clear in Revolutionary days, 
has been preserved to us in the great spirits of our history, such spirits as 
Jefferson and Lincoln. The sweeping vision of these men beheld not 
only the strength and largeness of the new race of men, not only their 
free bodies and intrepid courage, but also the ideality of their endeavor, 
the promise of a greater vocation for the American than material well- 
being. "I have often enquired of myself," said Lincoln, "what great 
principle it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not 
the mere matter of separation from the mother land, but the sentiment 
in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty not alone to the 
people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time. It 
was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted 
from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. 
This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence."* 

Such faith is the light of our liberty, and if this light seems to us 
to be dimmed, then we are very near to faltering in that faith and the 
crisis of democracy is close at hand. 

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are three different names for 
the same thing. The essence of life, whether of mind or body, is liberty. 
Without liberty there is no life. Liberty, therefore, is the measure of life. 
And the pursuit of happiness is, in last analysis, the carrying out of the 
purposes of life, in liberty. There is no need to revert to the old distinc- 
tion between liberty and license in order to modify these definitions, since 
this distinction is involved in the concept of liberty. License defeats the 
ends of liberty, and so those of life and happiness. With the in- 
dividual, license, by misusing life, narrows the range of happiness and 
leads to restraint, which is the negation of both liberty and life. In social 
relations, license again leads to restraint by depriving others of liberty, 
and, since every individual is a social unit, the liberty of one implies the 
liberty of all, and restraint for some one involves the license of some one 

*Speech delivered in Independence Hall, Feb. 22, 1861. 

4 



else. What actually endangers social liberty, therefore, is not the restraint 
of the individual, but the individual license which causes that restraint. 

It is clear, then, that when, in a democracy, social liberty is threatened, 
it is threatened by individual license. Democracy, which is based on in- 
dividual liberty, just as Protestantism is based on the principle of private 
judgment, endures only as long as individual liberty endures. Individual 
license, its theoretical contradiction, is its end in fact. 

The class struggle, on the side of the masses, is an uprising against 
the towering individual license which overshadows and threatens demo- 
cratic liberty. This license is threefold — political, social, industrial. It has 
given us in politics the machine and the boss ; in society, a plutocracy ; in 
industry, monopoly grounded in special privilege. But the political and 
social license are so surely the fruit of the economic that they would 
perish if severed from that root. It is industrial or economic license 
which is threatening our individual liberties. It is this industrial license, 
with its threat to liberty, which marks for us the crisis of democracy. 

Those who would ignore this popular uprising as unimportant can 
hardly have measured the forces behind it, or traced their origin. Those 
who would ascribe it to ignorant and envious discontent, to the vagaries of 
foreign theory, or to the selfish zeal of demagogues have totally missed its 
significance. These persons have not permitted themselves to realize that 
the class struggle with us is but part of a world-wide movement inspired 
by conceptions which we Americans ourselves were largely instrumental 
in first giving to the world in our days of clearer democratic vision, purer 
political aspiration, and stronger faith in ideals humane and just. Our 
Republic, conceived in a dream, of immortal parentage, and born in 
ecstacy, walked all her young days as one having communion with the 
gods. Democracy was then a part of our religion. Have we now become 
so sophisticated that when one speaks to us in the name of democracy we 
must smile at him for a Utopian or revile him for a dangerous fool ? Or 
is it possible that the social, political, and industrial conditions in which we 
live are, after all, the true realization of our first high hopes and resolu- 
tions? Have we, then, kept the pure and reverent vows of our national 
adolescence ? Liberty, equality of opportunity, brotherhood in sharing the 
burdens and quaffing the wine of life — these ideas were the ruling en- 
thusiasms of our fresh youth. Are we now, in our maturity, loyal to 
them still? 

5 



Because his country is every bit as dear to him as it was to his fore- 
fathers, the true American is unwilling to believe that in a short hundred 
years the principles for which they gave themselves can have been dis- 
carded or dishonored. But infatuation is not true love of country. To 
be a patriot in the highest sense is to serve one's country because in that 
service lie justice and honor, the upholding of a righteous national will. 
The false patriotism which sets a blind allegiance above conscience is a 
primitive ideal, springing from a confusion of sentiments and utterly 
without virtue for the clearer reason of today.* It becomes part of the 
patriot's duty, therefore, not only to spring up at the trumpet call to arms, 
not only to charge with battle cry against the national foe, but to weigh 
the cause at issue, to demand of it that it be just, and, if it be unrighteous, 
then to lay down his arms rather than do violence to himself, his country, 
and mankind. It may become part of his duty even to contend against his 
country's folly, license, or sin, for the very sake of his faith in the country 
of his heart, where wisdom and liberty and virture are set up forever and 
can not be thrown down. 

The masses are struggling for this country of the heart. The democ- 
racy which to their anticipation appears attractive and noble, worth pain 
and sacrifice to attain and enjoy, though yet unrealized, is for them the 
true fatherland. However we may differ, if indeed we do differ, with 
their aims, we can not doubt their earnestness. It is rather for us to ask 
ourselves whether in opposing them we should not be lifting violent hands 
against the spirit of the faith which was our own. Professor Seligman, 
for instance, though one of the strongest opponents of socialism as he 
conceives it, is too clear-sighted not to see and too just not to admit gen- 
erously the idealit}^ of the socialist movement. "Instead of being the 
voice of envy and confiscation," he writes, "as it often appears to the 
smug, the sleek and the contented, socialism is to the elect few an inspiring 
ideal and a veritable religion ; while in the case of the mass it is an inartic- 
ulate cry of anguish and a vague expression of the demand for social 
progress."** With the trades unions the ruling spirit is the same, ad- 
mitting grave exceptions. To the union workman, who is making sacri- 
fices to raise the whole level of his trade, the "scab," the pet of the em- 



*Max Forrester Eastmen: "Patriotism; a Primitive Ideal," in The Interna- 
tional Journal of Ethics, July, 1906. 
♦♦"Principles of Economics," p. 561. 

6 



ployer, is the type of mean and narrow selfishness, an enemy to the class 
and an obstacle in the way of social progress. Though the unionist still 
declares himself the opponent of socialist theory, recent developments 
prove that, whether he will or not, he is forced to follow the socialist 
tactics in making use of the ballot for the cure of economic ills. The con- 
certed entrance of organized labor into politics is, therefore, one of the 
most striking sociological events in our history. After attempting through 
organization to secure, piece-meal, sporadic concessions from the employ- 
ing class, the trades unions find themselves in much the same plight as the 
socialists. They can not escape the conviction that the whole economic 
framework of society is held in its rigid shape by political rivets, that the 
strike does not go deep enough, and that to secure industrial amelioration 
they must make a demonstration in the municipal. State and National 
elections. The prompt passage of the employers' liability bill so soon after 
Mr. Gompers presented his famous petition, a year ago, and the enforce- 
ment by the Administration of the eight-hour law on public works, some- 
what tardy though it may appear, are signs of the political strength of 
labor which it were indeed fatuous to ignore. Where the labor of Eng- 
land and Australia has so recently led, American labor promises soon to 
follow, and he who would declare impossible a substantial representation 
for labor in Congress' at no distant date must count upon the intervention 
of forces at present not even visible on the horizon. 

On the other hand, the strike is fundamentally a sign of the ineffi- 
ciency of the ballot. Machine politics has placed representative govern- 
ment beyond the control, almost beyond the reach, of the represented, and 
though the wage-earners are in the majority in a democracy as elsewhere, 
\et what other class in America has so trifling a weight in government or 
so slight an influence upon the conditions on which government rests? 
Interests, not majorities, control the ballot in cold fact. "As for the 
ballot," asserts an author of much originality and vigor, "as for the ballot, 
it is the capitalist alone who has undermined its efficiency, by his corrup- 
tion of public offices and his purchase of votes, until he has driven labor 
from ballot to strike, until it has now become a fact that our best reliance 
for the purification of the ballot is the reform of economic institutions, 
rather than the ballot itself being an effective means for the purification 
of our politics."* Forced to the strike because robbed of the ballot, 
♦Sidney A. Reeve: "The Cost of Competition," p. 514. 

7 



thrust back to the ballot because of the limitations of the strike, organized 
labor must sorely feel the want of a more consistent programme. The 
fact is, that though it has acted courageously and achieved much for the 
betterment of the wage-earner's lot, promising speedily to achieve far 
more, it has not yet thought deeply enough to make the fullest use of its 
powers in obtaining its rights. The quick and important successes of the 
strike are a temptation to rest satisfied with economic conditions as a 
whole, despite the fact that these conditions mean and must mean continu- 
ous warfare between labor and capitalism. The slower, more painful, and 
niore difficult process of working up a decisive ballot appears by compari- 
son far less attractive. In practice, it has always hitherto been hard for 
organized labor to move in solid array upon the ballot box. Its return to 
politics — for the movement is unmistakable a coming home to true demo- 
cratic practice — indicates at least a tacit recognition of the truth that in 
last resort democratic ills, of whatever sort, are curable by the vote and 
the vote only. 

In a socialist movement slowly but firmly carrying on propaganda for 
industrial reform by the ballot, though still too weak in numbers to make 
a convincing independent display of power at the polls, and in organized 
labor in the field with issues which must shame the pretenses of both the 
dominant parties, may be seen and studied the working of economic 
forces which are shortly to rehabilitate American democracy. For it is 
these forces which are the motive power of the masses in their struggle 
against license for individual liberty. 

Thus from the most cursory glance at the history now making about 
us, it is evident that industrial questions, together with such government 
questions as these involve, are looming conspicuously large. Industrial 
license, threatening our liberty; popular movements, more or less clearly 
conscious of industrial despotism and more or less intelligently and rea- 
sonably working to thwart or overthrow it; and intrenched interests, in 
the ruling class, hostile to these movements, yet contriving, unrestrained, 
to control ever more absolutely the political machinery by which this li- 
cense is increased and strengthened ; these make up the characteristic fea- 
tures of our immediate historical environment. 

In discussing the situation it is the marked tendency of conservatives 
to seek refuge from perplexing realities in convenient generalizations ; to 
sort the warring forces under the antithetical heads of individualism and 

s 



socialism, or law and anarchy, and so to reduce choice of sides to a plausi- 
ble but fictitious option. In this way the popular uprising in the name of 
liberty is easily made to appear a menace to individual liberty and the 
sacred rights of private property, and the attempts of the wage earners to 
protect themselves by legal provision against economic thraldom are glibly 
characterized and denounced as vicious schemes for class legislation. By 
coupling socialism and anarchy together, in oft-repeated phrases, and by 
the free use of rhetorical invective, your commercial patriot is enabled 
effectually to vilify what he cannot or will not take the trouble or possess 
the honesty to understand. Not the least heartrending of the cares of the 
proletarian is the difficulty of making his aims and methods intelligible to 
those who by nature, by custom, or by interest are beyond the reach of 
reason. It is so much easier for such persons to cry demagogue, malcon- 
tent, and rogue, than to listen to uncomfortable truths. 

To confuse socialism with anarchy is, however, not so much vicious 
as foolish. To do so is just as impossible for the well-informed person 
of open mind as it is inevitable for the ignoramus or the partisan bigot. In 
view of the significance of the great socialist movement, the extent of 
misconception in respect of it would, indeed, be amazing were there not 
natuial and sufficient causes to account for it. Socialism, in the first place, 
is not fashionable. Second, it is hard enough to make demands upon one's 
time. Third, it is constantly being misdescribed and misinterpreted by 
those, now forming or serving the dominant classes, whose sense of secur- 
ity it disturbs. To master its principles, therefore, one must be prepared 
to accept the name of eccentric, to sacrifice a part of one's own leisure, 
perhaps to take sides, in theory at least, against one's own past practices. 
hi there much wonder that principles like these are not commonly under- 
stood, even by the cultured ? 

Very often the straightest road to correct thinking lies through ob- 
stacles of prejudice. True notions may rise, like stars, out of the mists in 
which they were not, yet were. Confiding again and again to partly fal- 
lacious hypotheses, science detects error by degrees, as experiment, de- 
flected by failure this way and that, is caromed along the zig-zag of pro- 
gress. If nothing under the sun is new, this is because discovery is not a 
result of magical creation, but is a link in the causal chain of development, 
in which each event, though complete in itself, partly includes another. Or, 
to take another simile, human thought may be said to proceed through a 

9 



series of shocks, each of which is attended by the explosion of a wrong 
concept and by a flash of truth. 

Thus for a shorter course in sociaHsm, if one is actually in earnest, 
an examination of individualism may well form the first lessons. Every 
one is sure that he knows what individualism is, and that it is right and 
admirable. That in good part every one is perfectly correct so to believe, 
may promptly be admitted. Not all of individualism is commonly under- 
stood, however, nor is so much of it as is misunderstood either right or 
admirable. By holding to the true in individualism, discarding the false, 
our thought is prepared to grasp the true in socialism. 

"The unlocking of the secrets of Nature, the conquest of new worlds, 
and the vast opportunities opened to private initiative have made this the 
era of individualism. The hardy, the adventurous and the conspicuously 
able, together with the adroit, the fortunate and the occasionally unscrupu- 
lous, have hailed the advent of these well-nigh limitless chances to forge 
ahead, with but scant regard to the coincidence between their interests and 
those of others. The Anglo-Saxon 'Each for himself, and the devil take 
the hmdmost,' like the Germanic 'God helps him who helps himself,' has 
been the watchword of modern economic life."* Here is a portrait, by a 
master hand, of the economic individualist, set off against a background 
of his own making. There he stands, a composite of pluck and bravado, 
of achievement and selfishness, of power and license ; a strong but scarcely 
a winning figure, who compels a certain awe but appeals very little to the 
affections ; a Titan rather than a man ; a master, not a brother. If in- 
dividualism is all of this, then it can never be made a guide for general 
human action. If this is all of individualism, then to practice it would 
leave the world as truly Pagan as if no Christ had ever lived. If the age 
of individualism is the age in which this type is perforce developed and 
preserved, then in it the age of democracy is superseded and liberty is 
at an end. 

For it is the end of liberty when license has ceased to be regarded 
as a privation of individual right. And the age of the individualist, as 
thus described, is the age in which the greatest possible number of persons 
are deprived of all individuality, that an increasingly smaller number of 
persons may give their individualities free rein. 

It will be said, perhaps, that our quotation describes individualism 

♦Seligman: "Principles of Economics," p. 561. 

lO 



carried to excess. It will be objected, perhaps, that individualism cannot 
logically be suffered to run to such extremes, and that in order that mod- 
erate and beneficent individualism shall be encouraged and protected, 
immoderate and maleficent individualism must in all consistency be re- 
buked and eliminated. These points would be very well taken. They 
vould indicate that our disputant must be prepared to suggest some plan 
for effecting what he admits to be desirable, namely, the keeping of in- 
dividualistic activities within bounds, for the common good. Moreover, 
since it is economic individualism which is under discussion, his position 
would promise that this plan will provide for the control of economic 
individualism, with its watchword of "Every man for himself." But 
control of economic individualism is the essential idea of socialism. The 
consistent individualist thus finds himself at one, in a cardinal aim, with 
the socialist. And surely, one might conclude, with harmonious ends as 
a meeting ground, discussion of means should well follow frankly and 
without acrimony. 

''But the means — the means," protests, very likely, our individualist; 
"the means are the whole thing. What good does it do to desire a certain 
end if one is to seek it by means more difficult to secure than the end 
itself? Indignant at outrageous economic inequalities, both of us desire 
to overcome them. But I am content to go about reform in a common- 
sense way, mindful that I am handling a big problem and that the factor 
of main difficulty is the imperfection of human nature. I realize that I 
must be content to move slowly, by ways ordained. You socialists, on 
the other hand, insist on an impossible equality, refuse to employ any 
sort of compromise or management, and demand either unconditional 
surrender or a revolution of force. Such differences between us as to 
method are irreconcilable ; far more than our common wishes draw us 
together, these force us asunder. Besides, you socialists are giving alto- 
gether too much weight to the economic side of the question. Life is 
not all bread and butter, fuel and shelter. Why, even if you could get 
what you want in your own way, you could never create a millennium 
out of commodities." 

Now, if the anti-socialist — for one can hardly continue to call him 
merely an individualist and yet leave him any polemic identity — if the 
anti-socialist were actually to say these very things, it would help along 
the argument wonderfully. For they are the ill-judged phrases of 

II 



prejudice, inviting correction by reason. Let us proceed, then, as if 
such an invitation to correct popular fallacies about socialism had in fact 
been given, and let us begin with that fallacy which charges the socialist 
with overemphasizing the economic side of the question and aspiring to 
create a millennium out of commodities. 

It is safely within the bounds of truth to assert that the economic 
interpretation of history is a method for the study of human institutions 
fully as important and almost as revolutionary as the doctrine of evolu- 
tion in the realm of biology. Karl Marx, who, with Friedrich Engels, 
first formulated this doctrine in exact form, is on this account alone, 
entirely without reference to socialist theory, placed by Professor Selig- 
man among the half dozen epoch-making thinkers of the Nineteenth 
Century. Yet, though it has been successfully used by Professor Mc- 
Master in his well known "History of the American People,'' and though 
it is indeed now generally followed,* the economic interpretation of 
history is hardly known by name, even among the cultured. 

The doctrine gained modern currency under the name of the "ma- 
terialist conception of history." Thorold Rogers and Professor Selig- 
man, however, have shown the misleading inaccuracy of this title and 
have introduced it under its present more exact and intelligible caption. 
It teaches that in any period of civilization social institutions derive their 
form very largely indeed, probably in the main, from the prevailing 
economic conditions, more specifically, from the way in which commo- 
dities, the fruits of labor, are produced and exchanged. Social classes 
and customs, law, business and government, ethics and art, and so even 
religion, which mirrors man's appreciations of the whole of life, are to 
be interpreted in important measure by the relations of labor to its 
reward. The changes of economic environment, as one historical epoch 
follows another, produce a great part of that variation in the constitution 
of society which earlier historical method had attributed principally to 
the intellectual influence exerted upon their times by great men. 

The formulation of this doctrine is strikingly more recent than its 
unconscious application. Even Aristotle tacitly assumed its truth when, 
en very faulty premises it must be confessed, he maintained that a 
democratic form of government is impossible without slavery. For 
though he erred in taking for his minor premise an incomplete concep- 

♦Lampredht's "History of the German Empire" is a classical example. 

12 



tion of democracy, his major premise correctly affirmed that for any 
particular form of government a compatible economic base must be 
given. In thought, despite the intervening centuries, there is no break 
between this intuition of Aristotle's and the socialist's more modern, 
more explicit, and more scientific contention that democracy is impossible 
without the abolition of wage-slavery and of the capitalist industrial 
system. The economic interpretation of history, tracing everywhere the 
growth of society, has gathered together the facts on which to build a 
correct minor premise, which reads: For a democratic form of govern- 
ment, capitalist industry is an incompatible base. 

Our friendly adversary may at first be unwilling to accept this minor 
premise. That he has clearly accepted the major premise, however, he 
may not safely deny, since he has already admitted that the control of 
economic individualism is necessary in the name of democracy, and this 
is only another way of saying that an appropriate economic base is the 
indispensable condition of any desired form of government. It is there- 
fore evident that he is emphasizing the economic side quite as surely, 
though doubtless not so directly, as the socialist himself. The demand, 
for instance, that corporations must be controlled if democracy is to live, 
is wholly illogical and inexplicable unless it is in truth economic license 
by which the life of democracy is threatened. 

It must not be inferred, by disregarding the limitations of the doc- 
trine, that there is no longer any r61e in history for the great man ; that 
the economic environment is so potent as to warrant our leaving the 
heroic individual altogether out of account. The socialist by no means 
makes such an inference. On the contrary, as has been emphatically 
shown, the individual is his first concern. But the great man accom- 
plishes nothing without social forces looking to him for leadership. 
This is true of the higher, more spiritual forms of greatness no less 
than of the lower and more theatric. The effective moral leader requires 
nothing more essentially than wide preparedness in the minds and hearts 
of those on whom he calls. For the prophet to have honor in his own 
country it is necessary that he appeal to the desires and needs of his 
countrymen. "The ethical leader," writes Professor Seligman, "is the 
scout and vanguard of society; but he will be followed only if he enjoys 
the confidence of the people, and the real battle will be fought by the 
main body of social forces, amid which the economic conditions are in 

13 



last resort so often decisive. There is a moral growth in society as well 
as in the individual. The more civilized the society the more ethical its 
mode of life. But to become more civilized, to permit the moral ideals 
to percolate through continually lower strata of the population, we must 
have an economic base to render it possible. With every improvement 
in the great mass of the population there will be an opportunity for an 
unfolding of the higher moral life; but not until the economic conditions 
of society become more ideal will the ethical development of the indi- 
vidual have a free field for limitless progress. Only then will it be pos- 
sible to neglect the economic factor, which may thenceforth be considered 
as a constant; only then will the economic interpretation of history 
become a matter for archeologists rather than for historians."* 

"Socialism, then," according to Mr. Spargo, "in the modern, scien- 
tific sense, is a theory of social evolution. Its hopes for the future rest 
not upon the genius of some Utopia-builder, but upon the forces of his- 
torical development. The socialist state will never be reached except as 
the result of economic necessity, the culmination of successive epochs of 
industrial evolution. Thus the present social system appears to the 
Socialist of today, not as it appeared to the Utopians, and as it still must 
appear to mere ideologist reformers, as a triumph of ignorance and wick- 
edness, the reign of false ideas, but as a result of an age-long evolution- 
ary process determined, not wholly indeed, but mainly, by certain methods 
of producing the necessities of life in the first place, and secondly of 
effecting their exchange."** 

The aim of socialism may therefore be re-stated as the systematic 
attempt to reduce the economic factor of social life from a variable to a 
constant, and this not for its own sake but for the amelioration of society 
and of the individual lot. It is accordingly altogether unjust and un- 
warrantable to say that the socialist makes material well-being an end in 
itself or that he would rest satisfied with a millennium created of com- 
modities. His plan is, rather, a plan to make possible the life in which 
the material factor shall be so nearly negligible that the individual, for 
the first time, will find "a free field for limitless progress." Far less 
material this dreamed democracy of the future than the conventional 

heaven of orthodoxy. 

*"The Economic Interpretation of History," pp. 131-132. 

**John Spargo: "Socialism: A study and Interpretation of Socialist Prin- 
ciples," p. 64. 

U 



But our imaginary disputant charged the socialists not only with a 
rather sordid materialism but also with seeking an impossible equality, 
with refusing to proceed by gradual stages, and with threatening a revo- 
lution of force. Let us now discuss these misconceptions in turn. 

The great triad of ideas with which the Eighteenth Century ended 
and the Nineteenth Century began, the philosophic formulation of the 
forces which accomplished the French Revolution after preparing the way 
for the founding of the American Nation — Liberty, Equality, Fraternity 
— have been profoundly modified, in effect transformed, during the 
hundred years that have intervened. Historical experience has vastly 
enriched their first simplicity. In 1776 Adam Smith could be firmly 
convinced of the natural equality of all men and confidently trace the 
distinctions between bricklayer and statesman solely to the influence of 
the contrasting material environments into which they had been born. 
Liberty could then be regarded as the mere removal of political and 
social barriers between class and class, the simple negation of individual 
restraint. Fraternity, though demanded in theory for all men, was still 
in substance the re-assertion of national feeling. And it was in harmony 
with the conceptions of Adam Smith's day that our Declaration pro- 
pounded its basic political dogma "that all men are created equal." 

This simple analysis of these ideas has been outlived. With our 
knowledge of the forces of physical heredity, and of "social heredity," 
scarcely less controlling, we are no longer able to conceive of natural 
equality among men, that is, of essential equality in endowment, vigor, 
aptitude, or morals. Again, with the sharp and bitter experience behind and 
about us we are no longer able to believe in the all-sufficiency of mere 
political liberty for the true welfare of the State. Finally, with our nearer 
and more understanding relations with other lands and races, brotherhood 
for us at the opening of the Twentieth Century is an international ideal, 
an ethical demand for the kindly federation of the world. 

This enrichment of the three ideas which form the alphabet of our 
democratic rights is due in the main to economic forces. In the light 
of the striking contrasts which have developed in our midst in the 
sharing of prosperity we perceive at length too clearly that the equality 
in which all just men believe, the only equality which wise men find 
desirable, is equality of opportunity, or in other words the equal chance 
for every man to win and hold for himself a full measure of life. In 

15 



like wise, liberty is for our day quite obviously nominal and unreal 
unless it conveys not only the right to cast a ballot but the right to live. 

Equal, except in this sense of being alike entitled to seek liberty and 
Its fruits, alike opposed to the license which denies liberty, men never 
were or will be. Any other sort of equality than that, the equality of 
opportunity, no socialist ever conceived, much less desiderated. Any 
other sort of equality among men would not even be merely approximate 
likeness; it would be absolute sameness. If all men had actually been 
created equal in any other sense than this, there would be no such thing 
as society, no you-and-I relation whatever. For the world would be peo- 
pled with countless replicas of a single original model. Mirrors would 
be worse than useless, since every face would reflect to its fellow the 
same intolerable monotony of feature. Thought, all human intercourse, 
would be one maddening waste of inane repetition. The race would 
assuredly perish by suicide in a paroxism of ennui. 

The equal opportunity which the socialist desiderates is thus but a 
re-statement of the Declaration thesis, with the added significance gained 
in the course of historic experience. The Signers, with their triumphant 
faith in the power of the ballot to found and maintain the form of 
government later phrased by Lincoln as government of the people, by the 
people, for the people, were untroubled by the threat of industrial li- 
cense which today, for individualist and socialist alike, marks the crisis 
of democracy. They did not, for they could not, see that individualism, 
without economic control, was to beget the industrial despot, or that 
competition, at first a sort of free and pleasant emulation, was, under the 
spur of colossal incentives of gain, to degenerate into bitter and costly 
warfare for the market and, step by step, convert to egregious private 
use and profit the heritage of the people in the natural resources of the 
land. They could not see that through these economic causes the ballot, 
the cherished democratic safeguard, was to pass from the hands of the 
majority, the masses, to be turned against them by the few, the classes, 
whose prodigious and wasteful license would pervert it to the mockery of 
machine politics. If, therefore, the unthinking individualist can rest 
satisfied with his assertion that literal equality is impossible, an assertion 
which no one can hope with reason to deny, the more thoughtful in- 
dividualist, who has discovered the connection between industrial Hcense 
and misgovernment, must go farther and declare, by the same reasoning 

i6 



carried to its conclusion, that democratic liberty must stand or fall with 
equal opportunity. "Socialism, instead of being defined as an attempt 
to make men equal, might perhaps be more justly and accurately defined 
as a social system based upon the natural inequalities of mankind. Not 
human equality, but equality of opportunity to prevent the creation of 
artificial inequalities by privilege is the essence of socialism."* 

In discussions such as we are following, this charge that socialists 
would level mankind to a deadly horizontal of identity is commonly 
reiterated so emphatically by the anti-socialist who declares himself an 
individualist that the misconception grows apace. "At least," our ad- 
versary is almost sure to contend, "the socialist would insist upon 
equality of wealth, a demand which becomes the more absurd and 
contrary to nature the more clearly we perceive the impossibility of 
equality in character and ability. Spread out the world's wealth flat 
today, and tomorrow it will be in heaps again, with industry, skill, en- 
terprise, thrift, and invention in possession of the heaps." But this 
truth the socialist fully recognizes and readily acknowledges, though he 
would remind you that avarice, grab, and chicane might be counted on 
to secure and hold a goodly little mountain range of heaps. Let the 
socialist again speak for himself on this point: 

"The Socialists do not hope to distribute wealth equally among all the 
w^orkers, or on the basis of the needs of the different individuals: they 
hold that this would be extremely inadvisable at least without a long 
period of training under a system far more equitable than the present 
one. What they do hope to do is to distribute it in such a way that men 
will be rewarded as nearly as possible in proportion to the services they 
perform, and not, as is now the case, partly in proportion to the services 
they perform and partly in proportion to the lien on other men's work 
that they or their fathers have been able to establish through accumula- 
tions of capital."** Not equality in wealth is sought, then, but merely 
such an equitable adjustment of reward to service as would follow as a 
corollary were industrial license to be superseded by industrial liberty. 
But this the anti-socialist himself has already demanded in insisting 



*Spargo, p. 236. 

**Jeaii Jaures: "Studies in Socialism;" introduction by Mildred Minturn, 
p XXV. 

17 



upon true individualism. Here once more, therefore, the desires of the 
sociaUst and those of his original adversary are found to be in logical 
accord 

Gathering up the clear threads, we may now take the substance of the 
foregoing argument firmly in hand before touching the rest of the 
skein : 

I. A class struggle is on. 

II. The forces engaged are: on the one hand, the ruling classes, 
buttressed by special privilege obtained by industrial license, anti-social, 
undemocratic, egoistic, despotic ; and on the other, the dominated masses, 
the vast majority, fired by a living faith in democracy, despite present 
industrial serfdom, and filled with strong hope for a social state without 
privilege in which man's individuality shall be secure and free. 

III. A crisis in democracy impends, because of the growth of in- 
dustrial license, which forms an industrial base incompatible with dem- 
ocratic government. 

IV. The essence of socialism, the most consistent corrective of this 
license, is the doctrine that a free state must be founded upon an equita- 
ble economic system; that good government is impossible without equal 
economic opportunity; that democratic government is self-government 
by the majority, so that when the majority have come to be held in 
bondage, wage-serfs of industrial lords, democratic government, in 
all save name, has ceased to exist. All the rest of socialism is direct 
deduction from this. 

But suppose, as sometimes will happen, that our adversary at this 
point denies the very existence in present society of any such mass and 
class distinctions as these. Suppose he insists that the one true standard 
by which classes are distinguished, for economic purposes, is not their 
relation to the production and distribution of the products of labor, but 
their earning capacity according to the scale of incomes in the Census 
figures ; that the oil king, or the silver king, or the copper king, or the 
railroad king is no true king at all, even in the industrial sense, but 
merely the very successful democratic citizen, with more wealth at his 
command, but otherwise no distinctive special privileges to mark him off 
in kind and in interest from the miners, the trainmen, and the clerks who 
earn a living by his enterprise. We would answer him simply by refer- 
ring to the facts. Clear past all mistaking, these will illuminate the 

i8 



shadowy places of his reasoning. Here, however, these facts can not be 
presented. They can be found in effective arrangement in "Mass and 
Class," by W. J. Ghent, "The Menace of Privilege," by Henry George, 
Jr., and "The Cost of Competition," by Sidney A. Reeve, of which the 
last is a book of exceptional power. 

Mr. Ghent, in the writer's belief, is the first to attempt an analysis 
of society on the basis of class interests with reference to the prevailing 
industrial system. He finds six classes in society, each one of which is 
differently affected by economic conditions and is forced, in self-defence, 
to seek its own advantage at the expense of the rest. In substance, 
these classes are: 

I. Wage-earning producers — i. e., urban and farm laborers, me- 
chanics, foremen, and superintendents, and clerks in distributive estab- 
lishments. Auxiliaries of this class are inventors and experts in applied 
science. 

II. Self-employing producers — mainly land-holding farmers and 
handicraftsmen. 

III. Social servants — educators, clergymen, physicians, artists, 
writers, and employees of public institutions. 

IV. Traders — (a) manufacturers and dealers in commodities; (b) 
financiers. 

V. Idle capitalists — "yes and no investors." 

VI. Retainers — "those various sorts of persons who are directly 
responsible to the traders and capitalists, and whose occupations consist 
in their contributing to their comfort or interest . . . lawyers, clerks in 
financial establishments, employees in domestic and personal service, and 
politicians."* 

Whenever, as in our society, the possession of commanding wealth 
enables the few, with legal protection or immunity, to control natural 
resources and public utilities, and so to fix the terms upon which the 
many shall have access to these resources and utilities, capital dictates 
terms to labor. The ways of the political dictator are familiar to the 
world. At the slightest offering of occasion he tends to become the 
despot. His word is law, or rather true law is superseded by his re- 



*For Mr. Ghent's highly suggestive discussion of the six classes, see "Mass 
and Class," pp. 77-87. Mr. Ghent is now Secretary of the Rand School of So- 
cialism, in New York City. 

19 



scripts. Not general right, but his arbitrary will determines what men 
shall do and leave undone ; at what they shall work and how long, where 
they shall dwell, what they shall eat, whom they shall marry and how 
they shall educate their children, what god they shall worship, what taxes 
they shall pay, whom they shall fight in war, and, in peace, how long they 
shall continue to breathe. These powers, the civilized world is agreed, 
are safely reposed in no man, in no narrow group of men, for they can 
be used with justice and mercy by the Almighty alone. And this agree- 
ment has been reached not by the fine-spun theories of closet philosophy 
but in the hard and bitter school of historical experience. History has 
proved that the despot is too prone to abuse these powers, to run to riotous 
and disgraceful license, to rouse more and more the hatred and fury of 
the foolish and the indignant contempt and organized opposition of the 
wise. This democracy was born of revolt against such despotism. The 
hand which menaced its liberties was shaken ofif by war. Blood was not 
so costly but that it was poured forth without stint or tremor to wash 
from the soil of the colonies the shameful stain of a dictator's heel. 

Such was once our valiant love of political liberty. A great cause 
stirred to their depths the strongest sentiments of every sturdy heart. 
"Give us liberty or give us death !" smiled on the lips and flashed in the 
eyes and shone on the forehead of every Revolutionary patriot. 

A crisis as great, an alternative as momentous, confronts today the 
people of the Nation. Oppression again burdens this land for which our 
fathers died; a dictator again plucks from us, without our consent, the 
fruits of our labor, our courage and our lives. Royalty again extorts 
taxation without representation. But this time it is not the selfish foibles 
of a single foolish monarch from which we suffer, but the insatiable 
greed of ten thousand able brains. King Privilege, enthroned upon a 
heap of gold dollars, upheld by a corrupt ministry of sycophants, obeyed 
by a parliament of venal retainers, devises and enforces, by a nod of the 
head, the entire industrial system upon which our lives and liberties de- 
pend. 

As a result, self-preservation compels a splitting up of society into 
groups or classes, each bent upon saving itself from extinction by more 
or less organized action either in the service or among the antagonists of 
the privileged class. The wage-earners must choose between union or 
further oppression ; the social servants, unless they be honestly deceived 

20 



as to the virtues of their masters, must be silent, lie, or feel the dis- 
pleasure of the industrial despot; the traders are sure of immunity only 
by siding with special privilege ; the retainers — "lawyers, clerks in finan- 
cial establishments, employees in domestic and personal service, and 
politicians" — contribute by profession to the comfort of the lords of 
economic wealth. Even public opinion, upon the open impartiality of 
which free thinking depends, falls under the censorship, no less potent 
because mysterious and invisible, of those to whom its guidance means 
security and prestige.* The very essence of capitalism is privilege, for 
in last resort it is the private possession and use of wealth derived from 
special economic advantage secured at the expense of the public good. 

Long before clear economic principles had been formulated, great 
wealth was felt to confer an extraordinary power upon its possessor. 
The very rich man has always been able to do very much as he pleased ; 
to hoard and bequeath his riches, or to scatter them with spendthrift 
hands, or to use them to dazzle or corrupt, or to "do good" with them 
at his leisure, according to his avarice, his generosity, his vanity, or his 
whim. But it was the distinctive feeling of earlier times that this com- 
ported with nature and right. The social responsibility of riches, the 
idea that wealth is a trust to be administered in the public interest, is 
comparatively novel. But newer yet, and far more sparingly shared, 
except by the more advanced economic thinkers, is the socialist view that 
private wealth, in so far as it is traceable to some form of special privilege, 
is the result of economic injustice, is virtually the booty of an industrial 
highwayman, and is directly a menace to industrial liberty and so less 
directly but no less surely a menace to civic liberty. 

While following, during the past few months, the various exposures 
of the corruption in business and politics which flows from the reckless 
corporate use of commanding wealth, many of us have no doubt been 
shocked by the sense of having beheld abominations strange and unheard 
of in history. Such sins against honesty and democracy are, however, 
much older in this country than is commonly realized. Twenty years 
ago Mr. James F. Hudson wrote a chapter on "The History of a Com- 
mercial Crime" and another on "Corporations in Politics" quite as start- 
ling in their revelations asMissTarbell's "History of Standard Oil" or Mr. 



*See "The Menace of Privilege;" chapters on "The Bondage of the Press," 
•The Hand on the Univeir'sity," and "The Dependence of the Pulpit," pp. 267-321. 



21 



David Graham Phillips' "Treason of the Senate."''' Earlier still, Charles 
Francis Adams, in his "Chapters of Erie," showed the evils which the 
railroads especially have engendered and nursed from the very begin- 
nings of railroad history in America. The startling and humiliating 
force of the truth in these matters is that it has been known or knowable 
not so short but so long a time. In suppressing and diverting attention 
from such revelations as these, what devices of pressure and invitation 
must not the "Interests" have brought to bear !** 

Senator La Follette, among others, has recently declared that "a 
great moral awakening" is going on throughout the country. It is un- 
deniable that public spirit has been aroused of late as it has not been for 
decades. Reforms have been begun which cannot fail to bring real amel- 
ioration. The civic sense is being quickened. A revival of intelligent in- 
terest in questions of government, after a period of pitiable civic apathy 
and gross misgovernment, it a most hopeful sign of the times. But what, 
after all, has either of our great political parties to offer in the way of 
expiation for its past sins? How much, indeed, has either of them the 
untrammeled power to do, except within the limits set by the interests 
which, so far as leadership is concerned, are themselves the brains and 
sinews of the party? \ 

There are those, it is true, who ascribe the exaggerated growth of 
overbearing business corporations to law alone. Bad legislation, contend 
these persons, created these monstrosities of modern economic life; 
good legislation will destroy them. The law gave, and the law taketh 
away. Moreover, the courts, which interpret and apply the law, test- 
ing them by the light of reason, by the weight of precedent, and by the 
spirit of the Constitution, effectually prevent the growth of anti-social 
practice. The judiciary is therefore in last resort the sufficient strong- 
hold of justice, the sure asylum of the oppressed, the unpolluted altar at 
which fleeing liberty, pursued and harassed by license, may find sanctuary 
and secure redress. An incorruptible judiciary is the final guaranty of 
social rights, the complete safeguard of republican institutions. 

Such arguments have a very fine and noble ring. To review them is 
to realize, bitterly, that in the name of liberty they ought to be more 
than theoretically sound. Only so long as law is in fact respectable, and 

*"The Railways and the Republic," Chaps. Ill and XI. 
**Ibid., pp. 344-345. 

22 



the bench indubitably honorable, can human society remain stable, happy, 
and free. But all the more emphatically because of this, is it imperative 
to insist that the legislatures and the courts as well as those who administer 
the laws, shall be not only unsmirched but above suspicion. It can not be 
questioned that the logical alternative of respect for law is riot, the 
crazy and destructive frenzy of the mob. It is irrefutable that theoretic 
doubt of the integrity of the bench is the beginning of the end of reason 
and order. But what honest man can respect law given over to the greed, 
the fraud, the folly, the brazen thefts of privilege? Are we to uphold 
and cherish what is rotten merely because it takes to itself the name and 
credit of perfection ? Riot is deplorable ; riot is maleficent ; riot is wrong. 
But contrasted with rottenness, rottenness eating out the very heart of 
democracy, riot surely seems but the excess of brute vigor and desperate 
self-reliance pitted against pestilence. 

Law has, indeed, given. Bad laws, as badly applied, have squan- 
dered, like some hair-brained prodigal, the inheritance of the people in the 
land which their fathers' fathers wrested from the resisting wilderness, 
from the treacherous savage, from the crapulous extortion of a profligate 
absentee. Hundreds of millions of acres of forests its shortsighted pro- 
visions and partisan decisions have thrown open, not for the settler to 
clear and till with rugged strength and thrifty patience, but for the land 
thief to grab and scalp and abandon with the buccaneer's bravado coupled 
with the speculator's overreaching calculation. Has law restored to the 
people their lost birthright in the forests ? Or take the national policy to- 
v/ard the mineral lands. Here, again, law, though framed, let us assume, 
for the general good, to stimulate industry and to provide for courage, 
voluntary privation, and anxious labor their meet reward, soon came in 
effect to bestow upon the adroit and the shameless the means of oppress- 
ive monopoly. Law has given us the coal barons and the mining kings 
on the one hand, and on the other, the miners upon whose labor these 
masters have established by monopoly an interminable lien. Will law 
ever restore to the people the squandered mineral riches of the land, which 
individual license has laid tribute to privilge ? 

Again, let us return to the railways — those public highways in theory 
which in fact are private monopolies of traffic from which the public, the 
competitor, and the State are alike fenced off with the iciest effrontery. 



23 



Who gave the railways of this country the right to post "No thoroughfare'* 
at the entrance of these pubUc roads ? 

Here law appears in a fresh phase. The right of eminent domain was 
delegated to the railways that they might construct and maintain public 
highways. "In all the early charters, and in many later ones, the sole 
authority of the railways to charge for transportation is in the grant of 
power to take 'tolls.' .... But the rates of toll which, at that 
stage of commerical development, were regarded as reasonable, have now 
become prohibitory, so that the ability of the company to charge their 
charter tolls to any other carrier has given them a monopoly of trans- 
portation over their own tracks for a generation."* .... "The 
exclusion of all competing carriers, and of the general public, from the use 
of their tracks .... is the source of all discriminations, the sus- 
taining power of all pools and combinations, and the foundation of all ten- 
dencies to monopoly which the railway system has developed."** Yet this 
step, which led in one of the leading express cases to the question of "ex- 
clusive right of transportation," was held by the court to be a necessary in- 
novation. Thus did the bench, in effect, deny the public characterof the rail- 
ways, contradicting the very spirit of the legislation by which they came 
into being. "The denial of the public character of the railway deprives 
the railway system of any title to the protection of the law, and leaves its 
creation and preservation a mere trespass. It is only as public highways 
that the existence of the railways can be reconciled with the rights of 
property. The actual regulation and control of these highways in the 
interests of the public is the sole method by which these rights can be 
vindicated. It does not help them to recognize the principle in theory 
while rejecting it in practice. It is a mere paradox to say that the rail- 
ways are public highways for the purpose of appropriating the land of 
private citizens and receiving public aid, and not to regard them as under 
the obligations of public highways, to grant equal and reasonable privileges 
of transportation and travel."*** 

Who, indeed, can study political conditions without reaching the con- 
viction that, whether it be due to careless blundering, to restricted vision, 
or to criminal design, neither our laws nor our courts have risen in the 
past to the level of economic emergencies of tremendous moment, and 

*Hudson, pp. 385-386. Published in 1886. 
**Ibid., p. 371. 
**-*Ibidem, p. 134. 

24 



that in order to meet these emergencies, now and hereafter, broader, juster 
and more provident poHcies must be adopted and carried out, which, by 
reconciHng anew the civic and the industrial phases of our national life, 
will make possible the rehabilitation of democracy? 

These fresh policies, without which mere law must continue, in effect, 
to encourage the boldness and resource of the industrial adventurer, to 
the detriment of the rights and the welfare of society as a whole, will 
without question be framed to accord with the modern conception of prop- 
erty. This is "a form of property which will deliver man from his ex- 
ploitation by man, and bring to an end the regime of class government." 
Today, in the socialist view, "Private property is embodied in the capital- 
ist form which permits a minority of privileged individuals to dispose of 
the work, the strength, and health of the working classes, and to levy on 
them a perpetual tribute." But: "A new force has to be reckoned with, 
a force which is going to complicate and transform all social relations, the 
whole property system. This new force is the human individual. 

"For the first time since the beginning of history man claims his 
rights as a man, all his rights. The working man, the proletarian, the 
man who owns nothing, is affirming his own individuality. He claims 
everything that belongs properly to man, the right to life, the right to 
vvork, the right to the complex development of his faculties, to the con- 
tinuous exercise of his free will and of his reason. Under the double ac- 
tion of democratic life which has awakened or strengtheneed in him the 
pride of a man and of modern industry which has given to united labor 
a consciousness of its power, the workman is becoming a person, and 
insists upon being treated as such, everywhere and always. Well, society 
cannot guarantee him the right to work or the right to life, it cannot 
promote him from the condition of a passive wage-earner to that of a 
free co-operator, without itself entering the domain of property. Social 
property has to be created to guarantee private property in its real sense, 
that is, the property that the human individual has and ought to have in 
his own person."* 

"The time is not far off when no one will be able to speak to the 
public about the preservation of private property without covering him- 
self with ridicule and putting himself involuntarily in an inferior rank. 
That which reigns today under the name of private property is really 

*Jaures, pp. 29-30. 

25 



class property, and those who wish for the estabhshment of democracy 
in the economic as well as in the political world should give their 
best effort to the abolition and not to the maintenance of this class prop- 
erty" . . "those who constitute themselves the guardians of private 
property not only deny the society of the future ; they misunderstand the 
society of the present."* 

In order, then, that law may repair the social abuses which law has 
unwittingly or designedly fostered, it is needful that the law be born again 
in the spirit of today. The law of the past, when weak or vicious, has es- 
tablished favored individuals in the possession of class property in which 
the main body of society was ruled to have no right; capitalist property, 
through which the mass of mankind, the proletarians, are deprived of part 
of their proper individualities. The law of the future, by vesting property 
in society, will for the first time secure for all individuals alike full owner- 
ship of themselves.*"^ 

"The Socialist, or Popular Labor State," writes in substance Prof. 
Menger, of Vienna, "rests on the fundamental notion that its primary ob- 
ject is identical with the object of every citizen, and that is, the preserva- 
tion and development of the life of the individual and the propa- 
gation of the race. But in order that the State may be able to 
fulfil this object, it must control those natural riches which are neces- 
sary for the maintenance and development of the individual, instead of 
the rights over these being vested in a certain number of individuals, as 
is now the case."*** 

Those who hold that abstract justice and expediency cannot be brought 
to bear on economic conditions, maintain either explicitly or implicitly 
that the true social forces are natural laws and that the sharing of pros- 
perity must be settled in the struggle for existence by the survival of the 
fittest. The best man wins, success is the test of right, they contend; 
class distinctions spring from unalterable differences in human nature, 
and the ruHng class is composed simply of the stronger, more resource- 

*Ibid., pp. 32-33. 
**The creation and maintenance of the National Forests for the use and ben- 
efit of the country las a whole are a late recognition by Congress of the right of 
society to the State's provident care of natural resources. In effect, the Nat- 
ional Forest policy has thus become truly and beneficently socialistic. 

***Menger: "L'Etat Socialiste," pp. 31-36 (translated into French by Charles 
Audler) ; quoted by Mildred Minturn in her introduction to Jaures' "Studies in 
Socialism," p. XXII. 

26 



ful, more prescient, and abler individuals who have forged ahead in com- 
petition with the weaker and the less gifted. This argument is doubly 
fallacious. First, it avoids the true issue, and second, it drops its own logic 
half way to its conclusion. 

The issue is : What social system shall prevail ? Even if we concede 
that the competitive system has naturally produced the capitalist class 
which dominates society, and so justify its position on the ground of nat- 
ural law, nevertheless it still remains to be decided whether natural law 
is not now forcing the next step, whether society as a whole will much 
longer tolerate this result. The class struggle marks a protest against it, 
a demand that the few shall not, by whatever means, obtain and hold 
despotic control over the many. And this, we have seen, is equally the 
view of the so-called individualist who seeks industrial reform by other 
means than the socialization of property. 

But the greater weakness of the "natural law" argument is its su- 
perficiality. The struggle for existence is carried on not only between 
individuals, but between societies as well. Nature seeks the develop- 
ment and perpetuation of the highest form of social life quite as insistent- 
ly as the highest form of individual ; and in the progress of society down 
to the present, savagery has yielded place to barbarism, barbarism to 
feudalism, feudalism to individualism. In each of these social environ- 
ments the individual has himself become measurably modified. Customs, 
institutions, still more, ideals, have changed; the conception of society 
has become enlarged and enriched; private ethics and social ethics have 
become more and more subtly interfused. It is no longer possible, for in- 
stance, to regard society as a mere defensive and offensive alliance 
against external dangers. The men of a nation are no longer simply 
clansmen, fellow soldiers ; they are bound together not merely to gain the 
common strength of numbers, but to guarantee their private liberties as 
well, and therefore to oppose, even in their midst, the growth of tyranny 
and license, the enforced relations of master and servant. Hence, if com- 
petition leads to the survival of the few who are strong at the expense of 
the many who are weak, then competition has become an anti-social force, 
and the exceptional successes to which it conduces are but signs that ruling 
institutions are presently to be superseded by higher institutions under 
which the rights of all will be equally conserved. 

Economic competition, or barter, has proved itself the costliest of 

27 



experiments, even as a business method. The growth of corporations is 
at once the confession and the proof of this. Those who trace the evils 
of consoHdation to the eHmination of competition are in direct conflict with 
scientific fact. The only hope for economic liberty, and so for political 
liberty, lies in the permanent abolition of barter. Co-ordination and 
specialization, which consolidation and consolidation only secures, are 
the lines laid down by natural law for economic, as for biologic, evo- 
lution. These are gained only as competition is outlived. These are not 
the negative but the positive fruits of consolidation, and its avowed glory ; 
its failure and reproach, judged by the rights of the community, are the 
vastness of the privilege fostered by the increased profits from barter, 
profits which should properly have accrued, not in part, but in toto, to 
the community. To restore competition where it has been transcended, 
were that possible, would be deliberately to court and inevitably to involve 
a repetition of the centralizing process. For it is "good business" to 
centralize production and exchange, and the exigencies of barter would 
again coerce the captains of industry to undertake the same organization 
of forces, to press the same tactics of barter warfare, as those by which 
they have already won and now hold dictatorial supremacy in the economic 
field. 

The superb analysis of barter which Mr. Reeve has given to the pub- 
lic in his study of "The Cost of Competition" should be read and mas- 
tered by all who see in competition "the life of trade." For there may 
be found in fullest expositon the truth which Mr. Reeve clothes in these 
words : "There need not be the least hesitation in saying that, of all the 
things in our present civilization which can be included under a single 
name, for unmitigated wholesale cruelty of concept and for moral de- 
pravity of result, commercial competition stands out the unquestioned 
I'iader." Law, which now defends capitalist property, which grants both 
monstrous being and licentious activity to the corporations, has given us 
barter and its curse. Law can, law will, undo what it has done, when 
the intelligent majority demand it. But this law will proceed from a fresh 
starting point ; it will prescribe and defend not, as now, the special class 
privileges of exceptional men, but the general social rights of man- 
kind ; it will measure all things by the standard of the common health 
and happiness, on which all justice must depend for its sanction. To 
provide for the communistic possession of all the riches of nature, for 

28 



cooperative production from these riches of all which contributes to 
b'fe, and, finally, for the equitable sharing of the fruits, are the future 
functions of law. This is as certain as that here and there the true 
leaders of life and thought, intent upon it, are raising their individual 
voices high and clear above the cries of the market-place and the roar 
of barter ; as certain as that, more confused and less articulate but equally 
unmistakable in its tones, the voice of the people, ever more united and 
more imperative, is demanding the abolition of the pillage and corrup- 
tion now incident to traffic in the means of life. 

At this point our adversary, if he has held his peace so long, will 
assuredly interrupt us, to protest, as it is ever the unthinking rule of cur- 
rent conservatism to protest, against incitement to class passions. He will 
exhort us, no doubt, by the plausible fallacies which insist on the "har- 
mony of interest" supposed to exist between capital and labor in the 
abstract, between employer and employee in the concrete, and which dwell 
on the boon that the giver of work confers upon those who can not live 
without work. "Would you encourage the trades unions?" he will con- 
ventionally demand. "Would you preach the strike and all its evil conse- 
quences not only for the strikers, but for the community, the consumers ?" 

Yet he may be answered easily enough. Not passion, not discon- 
tent, not violence, is the cause of the strike, but barter itself. What ap- 
pears on the surface to be the general harmony of interest between capital- 
ism and labor is, at the core, absolutely restricted to the single all-im- 
portant requirement of both — life. Both employer and employee must 
live, and to live must have bread. In this alone are they in accord. 
In all else, while barter prevails, it is war between them, war with- 
out end; "for antagonism of labor's interests, by the extraction of inter- 
ests and dividends, is the sole object of the existence of capitalism."* 
Workman and workman are in true harmony. Labor and its tools are in 
true harmony. "Between labor and the capitalist, however, the antagon- 
ism is natural and inevitable. This antagonism must not only naturally 
continue to exist so long as competition exists, but it is desirable that it 
should. It is as natural and wholesome as was the antagonism between 
the colonists and the British soldiery in 1775. It would be equally a 
catastrophe for the country in either case, if it should supinely cease."** 

*Reeve, p. 515. 
**Ibid., p. 516. 

29 



''Therefore the striking workman is a pubHc benefactor. He stands as 
did the Boston Tea Party, in the attitude of earnest protest. The signifi- 
cance of his immediate action may have as little relevance to the radical 
question at issue as did theirs. He may get as little credit for sense and 
patriotism as they would have gotten had the War of Independence 

lailed and we still continued subjects of England's king By 

his courageous, if blind, stand he does what courage always does : keeps 
matters from being worse than they otherwise would be. Wasteful and 
inefficient as it may be, the strike is the only means, outside the ballot, 
which we have left in the hands of the wage-earner for maintaining his 
income."* .... "For war, complete enrollment and organization 
are absolutely necessary. For the first, volunteer action failing, the draft 
lias been relied upon and excused in all lands and at all times. The per- 
secution of non-union workmen and strike-breakers is simply this ; nothing 
more. The labor unions have been forced, by the intensity of vertical 
competition with capitalism, to eliminate horizontal competition between 
themselves of a suicidal sort, to quell dissention within the ranks, to adopt 
drastic union. In order to avoid slavery they compel union.'"^* 

"This is not compatible with free conditions? No; but the condi- 
tions are not free. Privilege controls the avenues of employment, and 
in that sense tends to enslave labor. If trades unions are against the free 
exercise of personal liberty, censure should not be bestowed upon the 
unions without first condemning privilege, which first drives laborers to 

this course As a matter of fact, the 'scab' would not exist in 

free conditions. Existing in conditions of restraint and limitation upon 
labor, he presents rather a mean than an admirable character — that of one 
who would undercut his fellows when they are trying, and not unjustly, 
to put up, or at least to keep up, the rate of pay."*** 

Not the least striking, though certainly the least familiar, aspect of 
the warfare between capitalism and labor over wages is the fact that the 
true interests of the conservatives themselves, capitalists alone excepted, 
are wholly on the side of labor ; first because they are consumers, and sec- 
ond, because they are also wage-earners. For it must never be lost sight 
of that all production and exchange is essentially public service ; that is, 



♦Reeve, p. 514. 
**Ibid., pp. 517-518. 
***George: "Menace of Privilege," pp. 157-158. 

30 



that what differentiates the nominally public from the nominally private 
enterprise is the absence or presence of barter. In so-called private en- 
terprise barter with labor and with competitors results in profit and inter- 
est for the capitalist, the legal owner of capital, and precisely by the meas- 
ure of this profit and interest the price of the consumer is raised. In both 
cases the consumer is the true employer ; only, for the products of private 
enterprise he pays that excess over cost of production which it is the sole 
object of capitalism to secure. In all common sense he must be reluctant 
to pay any more of such excess, in the form of added price, than he is 
forced to pay. So long, however, as capitalism is able to depress or keep 
stationary the wages of labor, a larger and larger percentage of price 
continues to take the form of this excess, since "what the traffic will bear" 
is the only limit to the raising of price which capitalism has ever accepted. 
With every rise in wages, on the other hand, the excess is diminished 
and price approaches nearer and nearer to cost, or value received."^ It is the 
bitterness of this truth to the capitalist which is the secret of his hostility 
toward labor, since between the cost of labor and what the traffic will bear 
he stands in constant danger of being stranded high and dry, without 
profit or interest to show for his pains. But the consumer has no good 
reason to sympathize with capitalism over the increase of production cost 
caused by higher wages, since in no case would production cost be the 
capitalist measure of price. On the contrary, as a wage-earner, the 
consumer should observe with satisfaction the increase of his own earn- 
ing power which comes with every rise in the general scale of wages. 

But it is not the consumer's pocketbook which the system of barter 
most sorely slits ; it is his honesty, his honor, his consistency, and his peace, 
in short, his inmost self, his character. Constantly to overreach or to be 
overreached, to estimate in terms of margins all the values of life, to hire 
to another not only one's energy but one's will, one's principles, one's 
natural affections and preferences, is to sell one's birthright to indepen- 
dence for the proverbial mess of pottage. To win success in life while 
missing the purposes of life in spontaneous love, free choice, emulation, 
and the delights of work for its own sweet flavor or its sheer intrinsic 
worth, is inexpressibly to fail. For what Holy Messiah in all the ages of 
faith has ever preached salvation by adroitness and flexibility, or meas- 



*The increased efficiency of better paid labor modifies but does not suspend 
the operation of this law. ' 

31 



ured the soul by its commercial rating? Every true man, in his hours of 
impartial insight, has felt the bitter discrepancy between the code of the 
counter and the ethics of the hearth, a discrepancy beyond the power of 
the sophist or the casuist to smooth away. It is only because life must 
be conserved and perpetuated that we have become vulgarized. Beat as 
we may against the institutional walls which hem us in, all law, all prece- 
dent, all example, and all public opinion confine us to the straitened way 
of barter. Escape there is, but only by razing these dungeons of the 
spirit and in their places building the generous edifice of comradeship 
and peace. 

Too long have we listened to the advocates of laisses-faire, "whose 
programme is 'hands off,' and whose aspiration is to reduce the function 
of government to the narrowest possible limits."* As Professor Seligman 
has pointed out, "the logical conclusion of such a theory is anarchy or no 
government." Indeed, laissez-faire has already led, with us, to the only 
sort of anarchy which we shall ever have to dread, the anarchy of un- 
bridled self-will, dissipation, greed. Laissez-faire, opening the flood-gates 
to the viking in our blood, has set every sturdy outlaw among us maraud- 
ing on the high seas of industry. Laissez-faire invites the economic ty- 
rant to lord it at will over whatever public domain he may bring to sub- 
jection. It is high time, in the name of society to cry instead: "Laissez- 
vivre !" 

And now, in the very stronghold of the classical school of political 
economy, from which its principles were so long and so stoutly defended, 
in Yale University, where Professor Sumner once led this school of 
thought in America, the doctrine of laissez-faire — the economic individ- 
ualism of Adam Smith, of Ricardo, of James Mill, of John Stuart Mill, 
of Herbert Spencer — is at last frankly rejected. In a paper entitled 
"Why Has the Doctrine of Laissez-faire Been Abandoned?" Professor 
Irving Fisher even assumes that advanced thought as a whole has aban- 
doned the old ground and taken its stand on "the modern doctrines of 
governmental regulation and social control." This change, which Pro- 
fessor Fisher regards as "perhaps the most remarkable change which 
economic opinion has undergone during the last fifty years," has in his 
judgment been almost unconscious and is "not so much the result of any 
revolutionary abstract doctrine, as the cumulative effect of experience, 

*Seligman: "Principles of Economics," pp. 560. 

32 



which in hundreds of individual cases has brought men face to face with 
the practical limitations of the let-alone policy." "The old individualism," 
he concludes, "requires two corrections; first, the individual may often 
be interfered with, in his own interest, because either of his ignorance or 
of his lack of self-control; secondly, even when the individual can be 
trusted to follow his own best interests, it cannot be assumed that he will 
thereby serve the best interests of society. A recognition of these two facts 
is essential not only to clear thinking, but as preliminary to any practical 
solution of the great problem of human betterment." * 

It would not, however, be just to leave Professor Richard T. Ely un- 
rnentioned in this place. Professor Ely was once deemed something of a 
firebrand among the straw of ultra-conservative thought. A good deal 
of smoke used to rise when, no doubt before the time was ripe, he would 
speak the prophetic word which has since become fulfilment. In 1884 
he clearly took the lead in his paper, "The Past and Present of Political 
Economy."** 

This plainly showed the direction which economical thought was then 
fast taking and since has firmly followed. It gave incidentally full credit 
to the gallant if unsystematic warfare made against the classical doctrine 
by Frederick Maurice, Ruskin and Carlyle, "all of whom condemned in 
unmeasured terms the 'Cobden and Bright' political economy as detest- 
able," and used such expressions as "bestial idiocy," "in speaking of free 
competition as a measure of wages." And it showed, too, what service had 
been done by such thinkers as Karl Knies and others of the newer genera- 
tion in their more scientific and temperate dealings with the problem. 
. . . . "This younger political economy," wrote Professor Ely, "no 
longer permits the science to be used as a tool in the hands of the greedy 
and avaricious for keeping down and oppressing the laboring classes. It 
does not acknowledge laissez-faire as an excuse for doing nothing while 
people starve, nor allow the all-sufficiency of competition as a plea for 
grinding the poor. It denotes a return to the grand principle of common 
sense and Christian precept. Love, generosity, nobility of character, self- 
sacrifice, and all that is best and truest in our nature have their place in 
economic life. For the economists of the Historical School, the political 



*In Science for Jan. 4, 1907. 
**Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science," Vol. 
II. 

LOFC. 33 



economy of the present, recognize with Thomas Hughes that we have all 
to learn somehow or other that the first duty of man in trade, as in other 
departments of human employment, is to follow the Golden Rule" . . 
And this was written nearly a quarter of a century ago. 

In opposing objections, earlier in this discussion, to the socialist's 
means of attaining his aims, our adversary charged that the socialist re- 
jects the ways ordained and advocates the use of force. This point brings 
us to the second division of our subject, the question of method. 

From the foregoing it is, in the first place, quite clear that socialist 
expectations for the future include changes so radical as to suggest not 
so much reform as revolution. Ideas now dominant are to be superseded 
by ideas now largely disparaged, misrepresented, or ill-understood. In- 
stitutions time-honored and revered are to be supplanted by new institu- 
tions which are to rise upon the foundations of the old. Hastily inferring 
that these changes are to take place, sweepingly, all at once, many over- 
zealous socialists, in the face of the intrenched opposition of the con- 
servatives, can see no means capable of bringing them about but force. 
Happily, however, socialists in America are fast learning, what their 
comrades in other countries have already grasped, that, while socialist 
theory is revolutionary because thorough, socialist method, like 
all other constructive method, within politics at least, must proceed by 
compromise and management, and that force, as the saying goes, is the 
weapon not of revolution, but of counter-revolution. Force is the last 
resort of weak causes, of minorities ; for stable gains it is essential to 
command not only a majority but an overwhelming majority. Without 
this, political action suffices only to court reaction. 

I. As a first step, therefore, the vast majority must come to demand 
the programme offered to their votes. Nor is it enough that the pro- 
gramme is demanded unless it is demanded intelligently, reasonably, not 
by volatile passion, which boils today and is cold tomorrow. The major- 
ity must be shown that the programme merits their constant adherence, 
that it does in fact express their true desires and conserve their true inter- 
ests. Thus arises the need of a propaganda to make clear, unmistakably 
clear, precisely what the programme is. 

Easily overlooked, however, is the equal and complementary need of 
showing that the programme is within reach of practical attainment. Yet 
this is only another way of saying that the programme which appeals to 

34 



reason must itself be reasonable ; not only consistent and defensible in 
theory, but also capable of realization in fact. The programme must 
complete the exposition of principles by prescribing or at least proposing 
tactics suitable for their carrying out. The tactics for carrying out the 
principles of socialism are commonly called "method." Want of method, 
in this sense, has been a conspicuous weakness in the American socialist 
propaganda. The most plausible objection hitherto raised by the conserv- 
atives to the advances of socialism has taken the form of the direct ques- 
tion : "Granted that much of your programme is desirable ; but how are 
you going to set about putting it in effect ?" For, when disinterested and 
ingenuous, this expresses nothing more than the legitimate challenge of 
common sense. 

Contrasted with its case in Germany, where it forms the one well 
organized and efficient party of the empire, American socialism, with its 
400,000 votes and its lack of weighty representation, makes but a sorry 
party showing. But it is by no means so nearly negligible politically as first 
appearances indicate. Ever since Mr. James Bryce, in his classical study, 
commented on our Commonwealth, except perhaps for "Free Silver," the 
two great parties have remained without living national issues. Creatures 
of straw have been dressed for us and made to look presentable, even at- 
tractive, that the people might somehow be teased or cajoled into cherish- 
ing preferences, flattering to their pride or their fancy, for capitalism as 
the Republicans brag of it, or for capitalism as the Democrats boast of 
it. The amazing luck of the Republicans is transformed in campaign 
oratory into a very gospel of prosperity ; the equally amazing blunders of 
Democracy are smilingly laid, at will, at the door of Jefferson, where, by 
a singular but seemingly reliable magic, they are juggled into nuggets of 
purest wisdom and the most far-seeing statesmanship. Some humorist 
has expressed the situation by declaring that: "Beautiful Bluffism and 
Reminiscent Sourbellydom are the issues upon which a generation of 
voters have flocked more or less rapturously to the polls." 

Now the country shows signs of becoming restive under this windy 
sterility of issues, especially as thinking voters, peeping below the surface, 
begin to catch glimpses of the mechanical bellows within both machines. 
In the past year or so "the Trusts," having raised popular outcry, have been 
raade a dearest foe by both parties equally, that each may display itself 
as the adroit and omnipotent ally of the overcharged consumer 

35 



and of the competitor who has been "clubbed down." How much 
of this is to be regarded as a sop to Cerberus, how much as a gesture of 
real affright lest the voter come to recognize the strength of the 
hand he is holding, and how much as a quickening of conscience, time 
alone can make clear. Whether the recipe for regulation according to the 
Republican cookbook or the legal knife in the hands of Democratic sur- 
geons is, either of them, destined to be pressed to the point of party sui- 
cide in the cessation of campaign contributions and legislative perquisites 
can, however, be decided with some finality off-hand. The socialist may 
look on as the highly amusing comedy progresses from act to act. Mean- 
time, well-grounded discontent and enlightenment, together, will grow, 
while the political theorem that a trust is more powerful than itself is 
gradually reduced in practice to absurdity. 

But the sowing of the propaganda may go on, and much of the seed 
will find the ground increasingly well prepared. Little by little events will 
clear the way for the reception of the principles which, though simple 
and complete in themselves, and in essence the mere articulation of true 
democracy, are still somewhat too novel to win perfect confidence in ad- 
vance of crushing demonstration. 

II. A second requirement of well-considered method is to make the ap- 
peal of the programme as wide as possible. It has already been pointed 
out that the evils of barter tax not only skilled and unskilled labor but 
every member of the community save the capitalists. The small farmer, 
the ordinary tradesman, has every bit as much to hope for from the com- 
munistic ownership of property and from co-operative production. Who- 
ever works for hire, whether his earnings be called wages or salary, may 
be sure that he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by a remodeling 
of industry which will guarantee to him the full fruits of his labor, with- 
out deduction for profits and interest. It is all-important to remember 
that it is not the mass of the wage-earners alone whose labor is rewarded 
under the present system as nearly as possible by the starvation wage. 'Tn 
each class or level of productive effort, as a result of internal competition 
for the opportunity to labor, the majority of its individuals are led to ac- 
cept the least income upon which they can succeed in surviving, repro- 
ducing and maintaining their social and economic level."''' Nor is un- 
employment any the less severely felt when the standard of living from 

♦Reeve, p. 184. 

36 



which one falls happens to have been relatively high. The man who has 
lost a $5,000 job may even suffer more acutely than the man who has lost 
$3. a day; for in the first place, he has probably formed costly habits 
and tastes, held a certain social position, enjoyed some immunity from 
pressing financial care, so that his deprivation, though less in extent, is 
more many-sided. To this is added his humiliation in proportion to the 
loss, besides the unwonted hardships, material or sentimental, to which his 
family may be suddenly subjected. The falseness of his previous position 
as a seemingly successful barterer in his class is glaringly revealed to him, 
and his whole life, though actually less severely drepressed, may be 
almost infinitely more impoverished. 

But specially significant is the lot of those who deliberately have 
elected to live for their work's sake, regardless of competitive suc- 
cess in terms of the market-place — artists, educators, clergymen, scientists, 
all those whose lives, because of their sincerity, most enrich the spirit of 
mankind. These, as a rule, are grossly ill-provided with defenses against 
the encroachments of the world of barter, and though desiring and ask- 
ing only the small boon of relief from economic pressure while they labor 
for the world, are subjected to this pressure heavily through lifetimes of 
patient and courageous abnegation. From him that hath not, barter 
taketh away even that which he hath, the priceless solace of unrewarded 
but consecrated service. For all such as these the promise of socialism 
dawns particularly bright and clear; for all such as these the society of 
the future holds in store the full meed of appreciation too long withheld. 

III. A distinct and costly error in method is to treat as hostiles 
those who find themselves quite inconsistently, but perhaps quite as unin- 
tentionally, on the wrong side. Will it never be understood that to be 
mistaken is not necessarily to be a rogue? Wrong convictions, be they 
never so persistent, are vastly better than none at all. Your honest but 
obstinate man, if he be but open minded, is the ideal proselyte. Indeed, 
it would be well to reserve persuasion and argument for those whose con- 
version would mean, not only the addition of so many voting pounds, but 
also a renewal of intellectual strength. Let it not be forgotten that it is 
not the ordinary but the exceptional mind which makes rather than adopts 
its opinion, and that ready-made opinion is in solid, if illogical, support 
of competition. Even the militant individualist may, as we have seen, have 
so much in common with the programme that, provided he can be induced 

37 



to think out the conclusions of his own premises, he may become prac- 
tically one with those whom he first too hastily opposed. 

But above all, it is essential to realize the realty of the difficulties 
which the nominal adversary finds in the way when called upon to recon- 
struct his conceptions of the relations of man to society. Not to speak of 
the pressure of barter — the threat of the material loss which he may sus- 
tain in standing out against the forces by which he lives — his whole en- 
vironment tends to keep him fixed. The opinions of his frends, of his 
family, of his teachers, of the books he is likely to read, of the edi- 
torials in his morning paper conspire to bind him by a thousand bonds to 
the opposition. 

Upon no one do all these conservative forces converge more directly, 
more constantly, or more potently than' upon the religious teacher. Su- 
premely dependent by his very calling upon adherence to denominational 
orthodoxy, he is expressly habituated to ways of thought and feeling 
which go with precedent, safety and repute. To live, he must have a 
tributary congregation, and for this, whatever else he does, he must ap- 
peal either to conscience or to good will ; the conscience of his class, the 
good will of men whose lives are built upon barter. Quite as surely, he 
dare not scandalize or outrage the feelings of his class. The truth which 
he teaches must be confined within the bounds of class propriety. More- 
over, his congregation expects of him, and will tolerate, only such cen- 
sure as it can grasp as just. He is entitled to exact of it only the mo- 
rality, the religion, which is accepted by the class to which they both be- 
long — the capitalist code of Christian civilization as it is. Let him but 
exceed these bounds, and he courts failure, he risks the loss of even such 
spiritual fruits as are likely to ripen in so arid and confined a vineyard. 

In opposing the Christian Church the socialists have, therefore, blun- 
dered precisely at the point where tact is most obviously called for. Min- 
isters have no choice but to preach the religion of their hearers. So long 
as they can do this without mental equivocation, without intellectual dis- 
integrity, they are but discharging their duty. Not until the religion of 
Christ itself shall have been restored to its original purity in the minds 
and hearts and wills of the majority, and hence of the congregations, can it 
be justly required of ministers that they teach it so. And if it should be 
objected that the leader's vocation is not to follow but to lead, let it be 
asked in rejoinder how far off from his flock the social shepherd of any 

38 



age has dared to stand. Men follow whom they themselves have placed 
before them. It is the exalted privilege of the non-conforming seer not to 
be received but to be rejected, not to be honored but to be crucified. 

Essentially, moreover, the Christian spirit is the spirit of fellowship. 
Christ, the gentle comrade of the ordinary, shared not alone his slender 
substance, but his bountiful affection with the common men he met and 
knew. He was of them, and so for them against the world. "What 
Jesus was, what He felt, what He believed and aspired after, illustrated 
the divine possibilities of every human soul. There is not the slightest 
evidence that this grand human life sprang from a royal line at all. The 
beauty of it is that it arose from the common people, and showed forth 
what divinity is wrapped up, not in the choice 'blue blood,' but in the 
common red blood that flows in us all. If there is one thing plain in the 
New Testament it is that all that class of persons who think themselves 
of finer clay than the rest of the world would not have recognized the real 
Jesus if they could have seen Him. This Galilean carpenter's son is not 
the Christ whom exclusive persons celebrate.""^ The kingdom of heaven 
oi which He had so clear a vision, was to bring a reign of peace and right- 
eousness, not beyond the clouds, but here on earth, amidst the literal sur- 
roundings, though transforming the inner spirit, of everyday. Nothing 
is surer than this : That had Christ lived in the midst of the political and 
economic institutions of today. His teaching would have been drawn 
from them; that He would have driven the barterers from the market- 
place as He drove the money-changers from the temple ; that He would 
have foretold, not the coming kingdom, but the coming democracy of 
heaven.** "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's" was but the judicious 
compromise of the social idealist with the overwhelming might of law: 
never a command to support the despot in his oppression of life, never the 
exaltation of license over liberty. 

The complete lack in Christ's teaching of any system of method, in 
fact, of any conception of reform, was a defect not of the doctrine, but 
of the age, which the doctrine might not transcend. His hearers, aliens 
in the midst of a conqueror's dominions, had no political ties save with 
their historic theocracy, no State save in the records of the past on the 
one hand, the Messianic dreams on the other. A political sense was there- 

*€. F. Dole: "The Coming People," pp. 142, 143. 
**See Josiah Strong: "The Kingdom of Heaven." 

39 



fore wanting; government was not the first but the last concern. Hope 
for the Jew under Pontius Pilate was but aspiration after race conserva- 
tion, after deliverance from Roman bondage. This hope Christ aimed to 
satisfy by showing that though a race be politically dead, yet shall it live 
if its citizens will but become citizens of the heavenly country. He 
preached the restoration of lost glories, it is true, but interpreted these 
glories in terms of the spirit, so that it was not the proud and the pow- 
erful who should resume the sceptre, but the humble and the pure. The 
whole burden of His message was the assurance that "the days will come 
when the gentle and friendly people shall cover and hold the earth."* 

Not less cruelly than the first who heard him, and not less wantonly, 
has the modern Christian society rejected the headstone of the corner of 
spiritual liberty. For not the gentle and friendly people, but a warring race 
of barterers, with the hand of brother raised against brother, has inherited 
this Christ-professing earth. Lessing's paradox was sadly near the truth. 
'*The Christian religion has been tried for eighteen centuries ; the religion 
of Christ remains to be tried."** For were Jesus again vouchsafed to us 
in these days, when only the verity of margins and interest rates has es- 
caped the skeptics, who can doubt that the gospel of peace and deliverance 
v\70uld fall from His lips as uncompromisingly as in Galilee, or that among 
the fresh store of immortal parables at least one would be told clothing 
in sublimely simple imagery salvation by the ballot. For citizenship has 
become the badge of brotherhood, and sovereignty the good will of men. 

IV. Again, wise method prescribes the willing attainment of that 
which lies near at hand. Shall we despise and forego what is good because 
it is but a part of all-comprehending goodness? Is it profitable to refuse 
something desirable that is offered merely because something else, though 
unattainable, were theoretically more desirable still? Does a man refuse 
to breathe because he can not at a single inhalation assimilate all the oxygen 
needful for a lifetime ? But little political sagacity is required to perceive 
that no minority can dictate terms, and that the most that any minority 
can hope for is to force a compromise, to withhold support in order to 
exact partial but positive concessions, or to join forces, when the vote is 



*'C. P. Dole: "The Coming People," p. 3, where this rendering is given of 
the Beatitude "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." 

**See "The Religion of Christ in the Twentieth Century," published anony- 
mously by Putnam's, 1906. 

40 



close, in order to save a good measure from defeat. Early socialist lead- 
ers, the strong, aggressive, absolute and uncompromising militants, re- 
fused to see merit in any course but orthodox aloofness from all parties 
save their own, with excommunication for the heretics. Experience has 
shown the weakness, even the futility, of these tactics, and the socialist 
gains of recent years in other lands may in large part be traced to the more 
diplomatic and adaptable procedure of the so-called Opportunists, Re- 
formists, or Fabians. In the United States the tendency is still far too 
militant and ''revolutionary," and the tactical lesson which American so- 
cialists most need to take to heart is the one which even the great dog- 
matic Liebknecht was at last contrained to learn. As M. Jaures has pointed 
out, Liebknecht, in the book which he left in manuscript, has recognized 
and very clearly laid down the true principles of practical method. A 
single quotation will suffice to show this : 

''But we are not going to attain Socialism at one hound. The transi- 
tion is going on all the time, and the important thing for us, in this ex- 
planation, is not to paint a picture of the future — which in any case 
would he useless lahor — hut to forecast a practical programme for the 
immediate period, to formulate and justify measures that shall he ap- 
plicahle at once, and that will serve as aids to the new Socialist hirth.""^ 

But this is the method of reform, which proceeds on the assumption 
that, be the ends however radical, the means of progress are circum- 
scribed by occasion and born of opportunity. Principles are the imaginary 
geometric lines along which the physical forces of reform move. With- 
out the ideal diagram, the forces are dissipated in all directions ; without 
the concrete substance of reform, the progress hangs in empty space. By 
doing now this, now that, as a way offers, not haphazard but planfully 
and ever with an eye to the final result, the world, which was not made 
in a day, is remodeled through the centuries to the needs of men. 

The President, in a recent address, dwelt with fruitful insight on the 
powers of the State.** He pointed out, what has not been fully realized, 
that in order to preserve the life of the Constitution we must study it 
through such eyes as those of Marshall, Wilson and Hamilton, who, stand- 
ing close to the font from which it sprang, could both behold it in its pris- 
tine purity and follow the true channel of its course. For the Constitution 



♦Jaures: "Studies in Socialism," p. 93. 
**At the dedication of the new State Capitol at Hiarrisburg, Pa., Oct. 4, 190«. 

41 



is a flowing stream which grows as tributaries of fresh insight run to 
meet it and to lose themselves in its broadening and deepening current. 
Wilson, said the President, "laid down the proposition that there were 
neither vacancies nor interferences between the limits of State and Na- 
tional jurisdiction, and that both jurisdictions together composed only- 
one uniform and comprehensive system of government and laws ; that is, 
whenever the States cannot act, because the need to be met is not one of 
merely a single locality, then the National Government, representing all 
the people, should have complete power to act. . 

"It is only by acting in this spirit that the national judges, legislators, 
and executives can give a satisfactory solution of the great question of the 
present day — the question of providing on behalf of the sovereign people 
the means which will enable the people in effective form to assert their 
sovereignty over the immense corporations of the day. Certain judicial 
decisions have done just what Wilson feared; they have, as a matter of 
fact, left vacancies, left blanks between the limits of possible State juris- 
diction and the limits of actual National jurisdiction over the control of 
the great business corporations. It is the narrow construction of the 
powers of the National Government which in our democracy has proved 
the chief means of limiting the national power to cut out abuses, and 
which is now the chief bulwark of those great moneyed interests which 
oppose and dread any attempt to place them under any efficient govern- 
mental control." . . . "The national legislators should most scrupu- 
lously avoid any demagogic legislation." . . . "But, on the other 
hand, it shall and must ultimately be understood that the United States 
Government, on behalf of the people of the United States, has and is to 
exercise the power of supervision and control over the business use of this 
wealth — in the first place, over all the work of the common carriers of the 
nation, and in the next place over the work of all the great corporations 
which directly or indirectly do any interstate business whatsoever — and 
this includes almost all the great corporations." 

Now, this right of control over corporate wealth in the field of busi- 
ness, and still more the right to tax wealth as such by empowering the 
State to appropriate a share of all private inheritance and even of private 
incomes, are in substance but concrete cases of socialist principle carried 
into partial practice. For the virtue of ownership lies not in the thing 
owned but in the rights which flow from possession. If these rights can 

42 



be exercised without nominal ownership, the desired end is still attained. 
The difference between a really efficient governmental control of business 
and of wealth, on the one hand, and actual government ownership of the 
business and the wealth, on the other, is principally one of names and 
definitions. The first is the exercise of certain powers ; the second is the 
exercise of the same powers, with more logical consistency and theoretical 
right added. The questions of real moment are : first, can these powers be 
exercised if secured without the added right ; and second, this granted, by 
what political means can the Government secure and hold them? 

Since all the powers of Government are defined in practice by the 
limitations of its laws or their administrators, the ends which the President 
desires are to be attained only if certain laws are passed, and only if 
these new laws, together with existing laws, are interpreted and applied 
by those who seek these ends either voluntarily or in obedience to the 
expressed sovereign will of the people. Ultimately, therefore, the people 
must demand, the people must obtain, true representation, the full and hon- 
est discharge of office by those who are elected and appointed. And this is 
possible only by breaking down the whole structure of machine politics and 
returning to first democratic principles in the nomination, instruction and 
control of every public servant by the individual voters themselves. 
Until direct primaries, initiative, and referendum are achieved by the 
people, all reform which goes below the mere surface must depend upon 
the character of individual public servants. And this, we know too well, 
is not to be depended upon under machine rule. Policing business is a 
thoroughly commendable policy. But is not the conservative something 
of a Utopian, after all, when he hopes to make it effective without first 
guaranteeing the integrity and true public spirit of the police force? 

Direct legislation, though but a single plank of the socialist plat- 
form, and though not exclusively a socialist measure, is an issue which 
may well serve to test the ability of the socialist party to carry out "a 
practical programme for the immediate period." 

V. The rule which limits a practical programme to the immediate 
period must forbid socialist tactics to work for international aims until 
the Nation has first been lifted to the level of these aims, and beyond. 
If the United States is to be at once the vitalizing and the humanizing 
agency in the federation of the world, it can hope to discharge this 
mission only when it shall have gained for itself control of the vitalizing 

43 



and humanizing forces. In order to give, it must possess, life and lib- 
erty. The fulfilment of this country's great vocation depends upon the 
fidelity of its citizens to the spirit in which it became a nation. 

Belief in this vocation for America is stronger than ever in those 
of her leaders in whom it has been most sorely tried, the idealistic public 
officials whose hourly skirmishes with the enemy have bred but a blither 
courage and the surer tactics of experience. Mr. Gifford Pinchot, whose 
guidance of reform in the Natonal Forest policy will win for him a high 
place in the respect and regard of posterity, has expressed this belief with 
exceptional force and verve : 

"The greatest human power for good, the most efficient earthly 
tool for the future uplifting of the nations, is unquestionably the United 
States . . . " * 

The basis of all national leadership is the individual freedom of 
public-spirited citizens. And this truth but points to another, namely, 
that "'The nation, and the nation alone, can enfranchise all citizens."** 
First let democratic rule be purified ; first let the Nation become a nation 
of free men. Let the Nation to her own self be true, and it must follow 
as the night the day she can not then be false to any man. International 
leadership must follow national worth with the infallible precision of 
natural law. 

And the alternative? What account shall we render of our talents, 
our golden talents of liberty and justice, if we refuse to apply them to 
their uses but bury them, with weakling apprehension, in the ground? 
Surely the Master of all Nations will pluck them from this country's 
keeping, and his rewards will go to another servant, to that nation by 
whose courage, generous instincts, and clean hands liberty and justice 
shall have increased ten-fold or a hundred-fold. This is the crisis of 
democracy, the test by which the world shall know whether government 
of the people, by the people, for the people shall or shall not perish from 
the earth. 

May, 1907. TREADWELL CLEVELAND, JR. 



*See "Public Spirit," an address; pp. 10-11. 
**Jauree, p. 8. 



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